A Home in the Cold
by dragonifyoudare
Summary: New England weather and her own fears keep sole survivor Tex Monroe with the Minutemen longer than she'd planned.


Now with actual words where before the upload was corrupted.

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Tex Monroe had planned to tear through the ruins of Massachusetts from the moment she left Sanctuary Hills for as long it took to find her baby. The New England weather had other plans. Tex had lived in Massachusetts for five years, and while she'd heard of freak snows in October, she'd never seen one. This was a hell of a time for that to change, but life hadn't exactly been going her way for the past few days.

 _Or the past two hundred years, depending on how you look at it,_ she thought as she stared out a hole in the wall. She shivered, not entirely because of the cold.

The sun had just crested over trees. Across the street, Marcy Long was trying to start a fire on top of some cinderblocks, but the sparks weren't catching.

"Codsworth?" Tex called.

"Yes, mum?" The robot's voice came from down the hall.

"Why don't you go help them over there?"

"Certainly mum," said Codsworth, but his clanking approached her rather than receding. "But Miss Texas, wouldn't you prefer that I see to your comfort first?" When Tex had returned from Concord last night, Codsworth had alternated between apologizing for his earlier 'irregularities' and fussing over her like a mother hen. He'd even made her a nest of sorts out of carpet scraps. He apologized for the lack of a proper mattress.

"I'm fine, Codsworth," she said. "The vaultsuit is warm." Not warm enough, but she had some approximation of blankets, which was more than the others had. "Go ahead."

"Yes, mum."

"And Codsworth?"

"Yes, mum?"

"I don't think they need to know how, uh, old I am." She hadn't figured out much about this new world, where a bottle of safe water was enough to make her thank every god there was, but suspected she that being known as a novelty was a risk she didn't want to take.

"As you say, mum." Codsworth hovered off to do as she'd said.

The snow lasted most of the day, and lingered on the ground for two days afterward. Tex spent those days helping Preston Garvey and his party board up Angela Rosa's house. She pointed them to the Laytons' root cellar shelter as well, and Sturges emerged from it with enough canned goods to make even Jun Long stop fretting about starvation for a while, though he kept his general morose disposition. Marcy Long also kept her bad attitude.

Dogmeat kept his habit of following Tex, and curled up next to her to sleep at night. Mama Murphy kept trying to tell Tex that her energy was 'tied to this place.' Tex kept trying to ignore her.

Once the snow had melted the ground was a swampy mess. They tried to keep the worst of the mud out of the Rosa house, but with Dogmeat around it still got everywhere. At least it kept Codsworth busy. The robot seemed positively ecstatic to have someone around to serve and the kind of mess that would, with enough mopping, give way to a baseline level of decrepitude. The mess would be back within an hour, of course, but that didn't deter Codsworth. No one had asked yet why he deferred to Tex in particular. Maybe they hadn't noticed.

Well, most of them. By their fourth day in Sanctuary Hills, Garvey had stopped asking Codsworth to 'try to take care of the mice' and started asking him to 'take a look at the new crossbeam, if Tex doesn't have you doing anything else.'

She called him Garvey, despite his repeated assurances that 'Preston' was fine by him. He, and all the others, called her Tex. It was how she'd introduced herself back in Concord, though she regretted it now. She didn't want to get too attached to these people. She wasn't staying.

At the end of the first week, a pack of feral dogs wandered across the bridge. Tex spotted one passing and didn't think much of it. She kept at her sewing, trying to wrestle the shreds of carpet Codsworth had made her bed out of into the shape of a blanket. The sound of Garvey's laser musket brought her running into the street not a minute later, pistol in hand. A dog lay dead on the sidewalk, and another had turned tail and run. A third charged at Garvey as the man cranked his gun. Tex shot it through the shoulder, and that night they made a leg into stew while Mama Murphy used some of their precious salt to preserve the rest of the carcasses. Dogmeat kept looking at Tex as she ate.

"I'm having enough trouble not thinking about what this is without your help," she said to the dog. Sturges snorted out a laugh.

"I don't know where you come from, but in the Commonwealth we don't get picky about our meat," Marcy Long snapped.

Tex decided to leave Dogmeat with the settlers when she left, whether he wanted to follow her or not. The dog was entirely too sweet, at least when he wasn't trying to bite the arm off a raider. She didn't want to see him get killed, and she didn't want to decide what to do with his body when he did.

The next day, she finally listened to the holotape Codsworth had given her. It was a quiet moment, one of the few she'd had recently when she wasn't exhausted from helping the settlers with their plans. The Pipboy's holotape slot was gummed up, but she managed to coax it open and it closed smoothly enough once she'd cleaned out the dust.

"Oops, haha. Keep those little fingers away... Ah, there we go. Just say it, right there, right there, go ahead. Ah, yay!"

She expected the sound of Nate's voice to feel out of place, but it didn't. Sitting in the ruins of the Rosa living room, covered in grime and oil from the water purifier she'd helped Sturges install that day, Nate's voice felt _right_. When he'd come home from the army, it had taken weeks for her to get used to hearing him without the tinny edge of the telephone. The recording sounded a bit like it was coming through long distance.

"Hi honey, listen I don't think Shaun and I need to tell you how great of a mother you are. But, we're going to anyway."

 _I'm not. A good mother would be looking for her son. A good mother wouldn't let herself linger here._

"You are kind, and loving, and funny, that's right, and patient. So patient, patience of a saint as your mother used to say."

 _Maybe that's what's wrong with me. I'm patient. I work and work at things, at these settlers' lives, and I act like there's going to be time later to find Shaun. Like we're all still frozen._

"Look, with Shaun and us all being home together it's been an amazing year but even so I know our best days are yet to come. There will be changes sure, things we'll need to adjust to. I'll rejoin the civilian workforce, you'll shake the dust off your law degree."

She'd been afraid of that, as much as she'd wanted it, even needed it. She'd been afraid to try and fail. She'd been afraid she didn't have the skills she needed anymore.

"But everything we do no matter how hard, we do it for our family. Now say goodbye Shaun. Bye bye, say bye bye. Bye honey, we love you."

 _I'm scared, Nate. I'm so damn scared._

She stopped sleeping in her old house after that. After a few days, she stopped going in at all. Then, two weeks after she had come into the neighborhood with Garvey and his party, she gathered her courage and went in one last time. She stood in the doorway of Shaun's room and, for the first time since the day the bombs fell, stepped in. She didn't linger. She walked to the crib and knelt. She picked up one of the plastic rockets that had fallen from the mobile some time in the last two centuries, and she left the room with steps she barely kept measured.

After that, she stopped sleeping in Sanctuary at all. She spent her nights in the garage of the Red Rocket station and walked to Sanctuary every morning. Dogmeat stayed with her at night. She didn't try to stop him.


End file.
